Brave The Dark

There are many ways to mentally cope with a global pandemic and lockdown. You could start a new hobby, learn another language, work through the giant pile of DVDs you have sitting in my bedroom. I did not do any of these things. Instead, my brain decided to fixate on the idea that I didn't love my boyfriend anymore.

It's important to note here, as a kind of disclaimer. This doesn't mean I don't love Finn anymore. I do, I very much do. It's just that occasionally my brain gets fixated on ideas. It might be an Asperger's trait, it might be a touch of OCD, it is almost certainly anxiety based and it is most definitely hell. The best way I can think to explain this fixation thing is by talking about my cat, Bowie.

We adopted my cat about three years ago. She'd come from another family, but after a series of circumstances, mum brought home this adorable white cat named Bowie. She let me know this by texting me while I was at uni:

"Make sure you shut the door behind you when you get home."

"Why?", I texted back.

"We have a cat now."

From then on, I have loved the cat. I love her more than life itself. I love her little face, I love her little paws, I love everything about her, she can do no wrong in my eyes. She is a perfect little angel, and in the first week, we almost lost her.

A neighborhood cat came to the door and Dad hadn't shut it properly, so she escaped. She was unfamiliar with us and the area and ran. I came home to mum and my brother frantically under the house trying to convince this cat to get in the cage and get back inside. It was TERRIFYING. Eventually, we managed to coax her into the cage, and she sat safely by the heater. But instantly, a fear inside me was born.

You lose the cat if the door is open.

No matter how many times it's happened (at least two more times) and Finn's reassurance that she'd come back, my anxiety flares up at the mere idea of her escaping. As I right this, I feel the panic rising, my breathing getting shallower, my body getting all tingly. I want to get up and check the door. Is it locked? Is she safe? Am I going to lose her?

This manifested itself into action. Every time I left the house, I'd get about halfway down the street and think, "did I lock the door? Did I leave the door open?"

Sometimes that anxiety got so intense, I had to rush back to check. It was almost always locked. I walked back down the street and then, again, did you lock the door? Is the cat safe? Eventually I'd get to a point where I would be late to work if I went back again, so I had to leave it. I had to sit with that anxiety until I got to the station; far enough away from the house that it was impossible to go back. If the cat was gone, she was gone and there was nothing I could do about it.

My brain was fixated on this. That whole walk to the station, my brain would be thinking did you close the door? I don't think you closed the door. You need to go back and check the door. You can't do that, you'll be late to work. But did you lock the door though? I think your work would forgive you if you were late because you didn't close the door. But I'm sure I locked the door. No, go back and check it.

Over and over and over and over again until I got to the station and could distract myself by watching a show on the train. She was always there when I got home. The anxiety was not baseless, losing the cat would be unimaginably horrible, but the process was also pretty unbearable. Eventually, we installed a flywire door which has an automated catch, so even if someone were to leave the door open, it would be spring back to closed. That made that anxiety go away. I thought it was concerning but didn't think much more of it.

And then, the pandemic.

I was fixated a little bit on the virus, but I was fairly sure I was going to be safe. I know that's not necessarily reasonable or logical, but I think I'm of the mind that if it gets me, it gets me. I am taking all the precautions seriously, of course, social distancing, washing my hands, but my job makes me hugely high risk.

I work recovery at Big W. Basically, I make the shelves look nice. I don't restock the shelves, but take what's already there and make them look as full as I can. So if an item is at the back of the shelf, I pull it forward to line up with the front. I make sure that all the items are at the correct tickets and I return items that customers didn't purchase. It is mind-numbingly boring, repetitive and requires no skill whatsoever. I am contracted to work five three hour days, and it takes me roughly as long to get to and from work. It is not what I intend to be doing for the rest of my life, but it keeps me getting paid so that's okay.

Earlier this year, it was a huge stress. I usually work toys, a section which everyone else hates but which I can make look nice if I go hard at it for the three hours. By about January, I'd been doing this for about six months and I was getting really into it. I kept running late to work (about 5-10 minutes) on Saturdays because Finn and I are bad at timing, which annoyed my contact at my JobSeeker place.

Despite being employed the requisite 15 hours a week, I still report to a woman at my job place because she provides disability support, which can be helpful if things were to go bad. Anyway, she was getting annoyed at me because being consistently ten minutes late on Saturdays would eventually add up, and she'd hate for me to be forced back to looking for work if I didn't meet my benchmark.

So, I was a little panicky one Sunday. I was in a bad mood because it was the Midsumma Carnival, but Finn and I had planned poorly and hadn't managed to get the day off. I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts because it was hot weather when I boarded the train to work. About halfway through the train journey, I noticed it was raining quite heavily. By the time I arrived at my station, it was hailing. I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Because of the bad weather, my train had been delayed, so now I had five minutes to get to work. Big W is about 8 minutes away from the station. I decided to run.

I ran across the pedestrian crossing, past the shops. I got to the Bunnings car park and wasn't watching when a car came out, just as I was walking past. The car hit me and sent me crashing into the ground. I started shaking, but immediately got up and started running. I stopped for a moment, realised I should see if the car was okay. They were fine, asked me if they could do anything. I said no, and went back to running to work. As I waited for the lights to cross, I realised I was bleeding and soaked. By the time I got to work, blood was running down my arm and leg and I was completely drenched. I was fine, thankfully. A little amused, perhaps. I kept saying all that week, I got hit by a car, I got hit by a car, almost like I couldn't believe it. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that's gotta be the worst thing that happens this year. Wrong, of course.

Anyway, being hit by a car changed my attitude towards work. I realised that I HATED my job. That it was boring and repetitive and I didn't feel like I was making an impact. The only things that were keeping my life bearable were film club which I do every Sunday, Melbourne Cinematheque which I do every Wednesday and seeing Finn twice a week. I began to think about looking for another job, just after I got my life in order.

And then the pandemic happened.

Slowly, everything that was keeping me sane was ripped out from under me. Film club stopped because the cinemas were closed. Cinematheque has shut for the foreseeable future. And Finn...

We knew it was going to be touch-and-go whether we could see one another. My brother stopped seeing his girlfriend because she had elderly parents, so it was a bit like the writing was on the wall. Finn has a compromised immune system sometimes, a condition which his mum shares. It was quickly apparent that we wouldn't be able to see one another for a little while. About a week before the first lockdown, I was trying to solidify what day we were going to see one another next, and I got a text saying:

Honestly, I know it's hard but I don't feel right risking things. I really do want to see you, and I really do love you, but we need to take this seriously. If mum gets it, she is super high risk, and I couldn't live with myself if it was my fault. I know it sucks, because you are at risk because of work, and you really don't want to be there, but we just have to do the best with the situation we have.

It was like the world fell out from under me, and my tears immediately came. I was strong for him, I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn't want to seem bothered by it over text. Inside I was breaking apart, and I felt abandoned. I knew that was absolutely not what he was doing, but I felt lost. He was my support network, and suddenly he was gone. We still skyped and texted, but that contact was decimated.

I don't let anyone touch me. That one's because of the Asperger's. If I let you touch me, it's a sign of HIGH trust. Finn, my best friend and only a handful of others I'll allow. At the same time, I'm also clingy as hell. Finn theorises that because I don't spread it around, I'm super cling with him. I cannot get enough. He needs to basically squeeze the life out of me for me to be satisfied.

But suddenly, that was gone. I was looking down the barrel of not knowing when this was going to end, how long I was going to have to stop seeing him and it terrified me. We've been together over six years and in that time there had never been more than a week where we hadn't at least found some way to see one another. My analytical brain immediately went into planning mode, surely we could make something work. But no, it was just... gone.

I began to hate my work. My job is one of the worst to have in this situation. I see customers every day who are bad at social distancing. We are told to limit touching things wherever possible. My job is quite literally touch as many things as you can. I hated it, and I began to have regular panic attacks on the train to work. I eventually had one on the shop floor, which was so bad, my manager moved my days from 5x3 hours to 3x5 hours a week, which was great. Less contact with customers, more time to do what I wanted and make time for seeing Finn.

After a while, I got kind of used to the fact that we were all in a pandemic. I saw the trains go from hardly anyone to getting steadily busier, a trend I noticed at my work as well. I had a sense that things were either becoming normalised or getting easier. Shortly afterwards, lockdown was lifted.

I eagerly texted Finn asking whether this meant we could see one another again, half expecting him to say no, but he said yes! Hooray, hooray! Yes, miracles, wonderful, just joy.

We saw one another again on the Monday. He came to mine for a quick cuddle session that turned into hours, because of course it did. After he left, my mum got a bit weird, saying I should only see him once a week. I mentioned I was going to be seeing him again Friday and she seemed annoyed.

He dropped by again on Tuesday to give me something I'd left with him, which again turned into a cuddle sess. Mum got more annoyed and stopped talking to me for the afternoon and until I talked to her about her knitting. Things seemed normal.

Thursday night and I was looking forward to seeing Finn again on Friday. It was to be an overnight at mine. When I got home from work at 11, mum pulled me aside and said, the family has agreed that Finn can't come over here anymore. I was immediately enraged. She and my brother thought it was not safe for him to come over, no sleepover, no cuddles, nothing. There was no budging. We couldn't go to his, because his mum was recovering from a surgery. Obstacles put in place again.

But we made it work. We went to parks and had lunch together and had car sex (and got caught by the police... again), until finally his mum said I could come over again. Things had settled. We got into a pattern of seeing one another once a week for a sleepover and skyping another day. Things were fine, and good and normal.

And then.

It started out the night after I first saw him again. We'd had sex and it was fantastic, but there had been a moment, a fleeting tiny moment, where I hadn't been attracted to him. It was just my brain being in a weird place, not entirely there, so I wasn't attracted for a milisecond before I was back in the moment again. But that night, as I was trying to get to sleep:

But you weren't attracted to him then. What if you're not attracted to him anymore?

Round and round, getting deeper and darker and more vicious and cruel, a spiral I couldn't pull my way out of. I was thinking things I didn't mean, couldn't possibly mean, had never thought. They came at me with such speed that I couldn't find a way to pull myself out of them. And then, I hit the bottom.

You don't love Finn anymore.

There is nowhere to go after that. A piece of information so fundamentally wrong and incompatible, my brain just shut down and went into this deep, dark, brutal place. A place I hadn't been in a long, long time. Like suicidal place. Like jump in a train is better than this place. The problem I had was I couldn't do this to him. I thought it would be better to jump in front of a train than tell my boyfriend I don't love him anymore. I thought it would be nicer to save his feelings that way.

I rang Finn that night, almost in tears and told him the surface stuff. The not attracted to him stuff. And he helped it go away, so I thought I was free. Later, I looked at pictures Finn had sent me and laughed at how ridiculous I was that I thought he was unattractive. I pushed that dark place out of my mind. Obstacles were suddenly in my way and I had to work on getting rid of them. I can task orientate well.

But when things went back to normal, when I could see him regularly once a week in an overnight stay, they came back, worse than before. If before had been an eventual spiral to hit the ground, I hit the ground. Hard. From the start. And I couldn't think about anything else, even though I tried.

You don't love Finn. You don't love Finn. You don't love Finn. Look, he's sitting there talking to you and you're here thinking this. You don't love Finn. Look, that proves it, what a selfish asshole you are. It would be nicer to tell him. Look at the way he's looking at you, he's got such love in his eyes. You don't look like that do you. Because you. don't. love. finn. anymore.

Constantly.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I tried to think about something else.

Look, that movie. It's fun, isn't it? We're enjoying it. Oh, that couple broke up. That's something you should do, because you don't love finn anymore, do you? No, that's obvious because people who love their partners don't think about breaking up with them every waking minute do they? It's the first thing you think about when you wake up, and the last thing you think about when you cry yourself to sleep. You're so pathetic. C'mon, just break up with him, it's easier. Why are you putting yourself through this torture? You don't need to. You could break up with him right. this. minute. and it would be over. All of your pain would be over. Everything would be fine and normal and it would be good. Oh, we're watching a movie, are we? You've just spent the last five minutes thinking how much you don't love finn so might as well turn it off. No real point is there. Just pick up the phone and text Finn, I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. Just do it.

Eventually, I got better at dealing with it during the day. I could pull myself out of it enough to watch a movie or a tv show or something. And on the train, I could watch a show. The one time I wasn't distracted? You guessed it.

Back at work. This job you hate. You're trying to focus on work, why, you HATE IT HERE! You don't like working for a corporation, you don't like doing a job that is essentially meaningless, you hate it. You're just trying to focus on it because YOU. DON'T. LOVE. FINN. ANYMORE. YOU DON'T LOVE FINN ANYMORE. YOU DON'T LOVE FINN ANYMORE.

I knew this wasn't true. I could point to specific things I loved about him. How he'd made me better, how I'd made him better. One shift I spent the entire time debating whether it would be easier to kill him or deal with the pain, then I felt so bad about that on the train home that I almost cried and then on the walk home, I was like fuck this and thought about an entire list of reasons why I loved Finn. And that worked!

For about five minutes, until it came back.

You're lying to yourself.

You think after a while, you'd get used to it. But I didn't. In the two weeks I had this, I kept trying to snap myself out of it. Literally, towards the end. I found that snapping my fingers was a quick way of pulling myself out of the dark thoughts.

You're bored at work again. Think about something. Oh, My Dinner With Andre, the Louis Malle film. I loved that film but it reminded me of Adam and how we'd had a weird dinner

SNAP.

But he also made Au Revoir Les Enfants, a beautiful film about life during wartime. So, which was his best film? Hmm, each has their best qualities....

On a good day, I could snap out of it fairly quickly. On a bad day, I had to snap my fingers every five minutes. I was EXHAUSTED. Fighting your brain is the absolute hardest thing to do, because you can't just leave. You can't just give yourself a five minute break as you prepare for the next battle. I had to be on the entire time or risk backsliding into thinking that stuff. Those thoughts were horrible and unbearable and not true and I didn't want them. But worse was the way they seemed to push me towards things I didn't want to do, like the train.

One night was so bad, Finn drove over to mine and saw me after work. We had a long chat in the car where we talked over the things my brain had been saying. Occasionally, it raised points I couldn't argue, so I told him that and he fought against it while holding me. My boyfriend is the most wonderful, supportive person I know. I told him everything, how my brain was like I don't love you anymore, and he was just like, I know you don't mean it. I know your brain does this stupid shit sometimes. We'll get through it. How can I help?

His kindness makes me cry. My brain hated him for it. It said he was weak, that he was only staying with me cos he didn't have another option. That he didn't have enough self-esteem to find someone else. I told him this stuff and he still said it's okay, I know you don't mean it, let me hold you.

He got into the habit of saying
I love you
You matter
I want you

His love for me was never in doubt. That was easy to disprove if my brain ever brought it up (same with the attractive thing. Oh, you say he's not attractive, then explain this?!). My brain made me doubt whether I loved him. But his unending support helped me.

You may ask why I didn't reach out to my friends. My brain is really fucking good. I skipped a party at my friends because the idea of being a fifth wheel while they were in loving happy couples filled me with absolute dread. And then my brain attacked me for that, and for lying to them.

My brain, for some reason, decided that if I were to text my best friend, she would convince me that my brain was in the right and that Finn and I should break up. My battle was a solitary one, and I wanted to reach out, but I didn't.

I told my counsellor this at our next appointment. And she said something that made everything just slightly less terrible.

"You thought texting her would convince you to break up with Finn. And yet you didn't text her."

I didn't. I loved him. I love him. With my everything.

So, why the fuck did my brain put me through this agony?

Are you ready, because my brain is a total piece of shit.

The idea of losing Finn makes me feel vulnerable. My brain hates feeling vulnerable, scariest feeling in the world. So, how do you get rid of the idea of losing Finn? You break up with him. WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU WANT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

Or maybe I'm bored and my brain doesn't know how to react so goes there. Or I'm tired and it does the same fucking thing. Basically whenever my brain feels a bad fucking feeling at the moment, it instantly wants to leave the greatest thing that's ever happened to me behind. Because my brain is a truly majestic asshole.

After she said this to me, I thought it was ridiculous. But the next time, it happened

Hey, you don't love Finn. It's okay. You're just feeling vulnerable, it's okay, we'll be okay. Alright, then. Now text that boy you love.

It was that quick. My brain still does it to a small extent. But I just point out that what I'm actually feeling is vulnerable, tired or bored and it's like oh yeah, my mistake, kisses. It was infuriating. I had put myself through two weeks of unbearable pain, all for it to be cleared up like that?

I couldn't work it out. It had to mean something, this pain had to have been worth something or why did I bother feeling it? I know that pain isn't something you can choose but it felt extremely weird to me that I was in one of the darkest places I've ever been to suddenly feeling like everything is okay. My counsellor wanted to know why that annoyed me so much. And I said to her, cause I want to honour the pain. Like I'm letting a part of myself, a deep dark broken part of myself die but not acknowledging what it went through. She suggested write a blog post.

So, here I am. Writing a blog post. She suggested this the day before the new lockdown came in. Finn says we can still see one another, but my mum and brother hate the idea and I don't want to make their anxiety any worse. So, six weeks of not seeing Finn. The man I love. I hope that during and after this lockdown my brain will be okay again, but I don't have any guarantees of that.

My biggest fear out of this is not getting Coronavirus and dying, it's that my brain will do something terrible again and that I might not strong enough to cope.

Finn said to me, when it was really bad, you're stronger than you know.

I don't think of myself as strong. I never have and I probably never will. I don't think of myself as a good writer either, yet I'm still doing this. It's kinda like pulling teeth, writing for me. I hate it because I have to fight my brain that keeps telling me it's shit, but I really like what I write. But it's a tool I don't use enough.

Writing, for me, is kind of like therapy. I start off with a problem and then I go deep and dark and make myself cry before I find the light. I find what I needed to find to keep going. I started this piece terrified of going into lockdown again and I'm still fucking scared.

My love for Finn feels tenuous, even though it's not. If someone tells you something often enough, you begin to believe it. After 2 weeks of telling myself that I didn't love him anymore, I was beginning to believe it. But seeing him again after I had found a way out was healing that. Being in his arms made me feel okay. Watching stuff with him made me feel okay. The other day, when we had sex, my brain didn't go to the dark place. It stayed there, present with him in that moment. It felt like a milestone. And then lockdown 2.0 was announced. Just as I was feeling myself again, the world has been pulled out from under me again. And I'm terrified of what this means.

I was watching an anime this week called Japan Sinks: 2020, and the final line broke me.

"Though the sun may set, it will always rise again."

I hope it's soon. And I hope I'm strong enough to brave the dark.